Amazon’s newest try to achieve a foothold in video games, 2025’s multiplayer co-op sport present King of Meat, has failed. Developer Glowmade and writer Amazon Recreation Studios confirmed Monday that King of Meat will shut down in April, and that gamers who bought the sport will obtain full refunds. “Regardless of the creativity and innovation Glowmade delivered to King of Meat, the sport has sadly not discovered the viewers we hoped for,” Amazon Recreation Studios stated in a press release on the King of Meat web site. “Because of this, we’ve made the troublesome resolution to conclude our funding within the sport, and King of Meat’s servers will shut on April 9, 2026. Gamers will be capable to entry and play all current content material till then, so we encourage you to take pleasure in your remaining time within the sport together with your fellow Contenders.” King of Meat’s closure seemingly will not come as a shock to gamers, or anybody who’s paid consideration to Amazon’s sport output over the previous decade. Whereas the sport acquired principally optimistic evaluations on Steam — critics have been extra harsh, based mostly on combination assessment knowledge from OpenCritic — King of Meat peaked at 320 concurrent gamers there. Based mostly on our hands-on expertise with the sport at launch, console gamers did not present up both. “I dove in on PlayStation 5 throughout its maiden weekend and was very not often in a position to matchmake with sufficient gamers to get a full four-player workforce going,” Polygon’s Giovanni Colantonio wrote in our early impressions of King of Meat. “I got here again on launch day correct and had a fair harder time discovering even one teammate. Issues don’t appear too promising on Steam both, the place the sport at the moment has 58 evaluations on the time of writing, pulled from the sport’s 5 days of early entry.” King of Meat is the most recent casualty at Amazon, which final month confirmed that its once-hot MMO New World: Aeternum would shut down for good in 2027. Earlier than that, Amazon Recreation Studios tried and failed with video games like MOBA-inspired shooter Crucible (which unlaunched weeks after its launch) and sports-fantasy brawler Breakaway (which lasted somewhat longer). Amazon additionally canceled an in-development Lord of the Rings MMO, and has principally discovered success in publishing different corporations’ MMOs, like Smilegate’s Misplaced Ark and NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty. Amazon nonetheless has a distinct Lord of the Rings MMORPG within the works, in addition to different untitled tasks and a pair of Tomb Raider video games.
Glowmade and Amazon unveiled King of Meat in 2024 at Gamescom Opening Evening Dwell and launched it the next 12 months on PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Sequence X.
